Hark

Hark is an American consumer-AI startup founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, best known for the humanoid-robot company Figure AI and the electric-aircraft maker Archer Aviation. Adcock started Hark in late 2025 and seeded it with $100 million of his own money. The company is building what it calls a "universal interface" with the digital world: an agentic AI system that pairs multimodal software models with custom hardware. In May 2026, after roughly six months of operating largely in secret, Hark disclosed a Series A of more than $700 million at a $6 billion post-money valuation, one of the largest first institutional rounds ever raised by a consumer-AI company before shipping a product.^[1][2][3] On August 5, 2026, the company announced its first product, Hark Handoff, a computer-use agent for web tasks, in a research preview.^[9][10]

The company was unusually opaque for one carrying such a valuation. At the time of the May 2026 raise it had released no product, no demo, and no detailed technical roadmap, and several of its own investors had reportedly seen little of what they were funding.^[4] Its first public product, the Handoff web agent, followed in August 2026.^[9] What Hark has shared is a thesis: that the way ordinary people interact with software is overdue for a redesign, and that the right answer is a single AI layer that sits between a person and everything else on their devices.

Founding and background

Adcock founded Hark in 2025, the latest in a string of companies he has launched across recruiting, aviation, robotics, and security. He grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Moweaqua, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Florida in 2008.^[5] His first major venture was Vettery, a talent marketplace co-founded in 2013 that he sold to the Adecco Group in 2018. Press reports and Adecco's own announcement put the price at a little over $100 million; Adcock has publicly described the sale as $110 million.^[6][7]

He went on to co-found Archer Aviation in October 2018, an eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft company that listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 through a SPAC merger. In May 2022 he founded Figure AI, a Sunnyvale company developing general-purpose humanoid robots, whose engineering ranks he assembled from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Apple.^[5] Adcock also started Cover, an AI security company aimed at detecting weapons to prevent school shootings, in 2023. By early 2026, Forbes and The New York Times estimated his net worth in the billions, driven largely by his stakes in Figure and Archer.^[5]

Hark is, in some sense, a return to consumer software for Adcock after a decade spent on capital-intensive hardware. The bet is that the hard-won lessons from building robots and aircraft, namely vertical integration and owning the full stack from silicon to interface, can be applied to a personal AI device.

Product vision

Hark describes its goal as a "universal interface" between people and machines: a single agentic assistant that can act across the apps, accounts, and services someone already uses rather than yet another chatbot in a box. The pitch leans on the idea that most consumers have not actually been served well by the current wave of AI products, despite the hype.^[8]

The company has outlined four capabilities it says will define the system:

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Hark's director of design, Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple product executive, framed the opportunity around everyday domains that he argued existing tools have not meaningfully addressed, such as managing health, finances, legal matters, and planning. In one widely quoted line, Chowdhury said he had not seen anything that "feels like something that will really help the normal person."^[1][8] When pressed on what the hardware would actually look like, and on the obvious difficulty of getting people to wear or carry a new device, he reportedly declined to answer.^[4]

That secrecy is a recurring theme. Coverage of the launch repeatedly noted how little is publicly known, and the gap between the company's valuation and its visible output became part of the story itself.^[4]

Funding and investors

The Series A, announced on May 21, 2026, totaled more than $700 million at a $6 billion post-money valuation. Parkway Venture Capital led the round. The investor list is notable for how many semiconductor and enterprise-software firms it pulled in alongside traditional venture funds, an unusual concentration of strategic backers for a company that had not shipped anything.^[2][3]

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Participating investors included Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Prime Movers Lab, Align Ventures, and Tamarack Global.^[1][2] The presence of Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm on the same cap table is striking given how rarely those chipmakers co-invest, and it hints at how central custom silicon and large compute are expected to be to Hark's plans.

The raise stood out even in a frothy market. A consumer company commanding a $6 billion valuation on a Series A, with no public product, is the kind of deal that only happens when the founder has a track record investors are willing to underwrite on faith. Adcock's history of taking Archer public and pushing Figure to a multibillion-dollar valuation is most of the collateral here.

Models, hardware, and operations

Hark plans to release its first multimodal AI models in the summer of 2026. Those models are meant to power a personal AI platform that works with products and services people already use, with purpose-built hardware devices to follow.^[1][3] The sequencing matters: software first, then devices designed specifically around that software, mirroring the integrated approach Adcock has favored at his other companies.

To support model training, the company has stood up its own data center built around Nvidia B200 GPUs, with additional cluster capacity reported to be coming online in 2026.^[1] At the time of the funding, Hark employed roughly 70 people and said it planned to grow to about 200, recruiting heavily for hardware engineering, product design, and AI research. The team already drew designers and engineers from Apple and Tesla and AI researchers from Meta, in addition to design lead Chowdhury.^[1][8] Hark said the new capital would go toward four things: scaling its GPU infrastructure, accelerating model development, expanding the engineering team, and designing and manufacturing its hardware.^[8]

What the device will be remains the central unknown. The company has not disclosed a form factor, whether a wearable, a handheld, a home device, or something else, and that ambiguity is part of why the round drew as much skepticism as enthusiasm. Hark is entering a crowded and so far commercially unproven category of dedicated AI hardware, alongside efforts from other well-funded startups and the major phone and platform companies.

Hark Handoff

On August 5, 2026, Hark announced Hark Handoff, its first product, in the company's first research preview.^[9][10] Handoff is a computer-use agent (CUA) built for long-horizon, autonomous work on the internet: for every request the service spins up a dedicated virtual computer with its own browser, file system, and terminal, and the model completes tasks by issuing cursor and keyboard actions, targeting x and y coordinates on the screen while clicking, typing, and scrolling through live web pages.^[9] Users can connect their existing accounts, and Handoff logs in on their behalf so that it can act with their saved addresses, preferences, and history.^[9] Demonstrations in the preview and the accompanying press release covered ordering food on DoorDash and Uber Eats, price-comparing and checking out on Walmart, Target, and Costco, booking restaurant tables on OpenTable and Resy, messaging and recruiting job candidates on LinkedIn, cross-referencing Reddit, review sites, and news sources for research, and reserving flights and hotels.^[9][10]

Hark says it started with the browser because an internal survey covering nearly 3 million screen minutes found that 74.9 percent of computer time was spent in a browser, and because fewer than one in a thousand websites offer a public API.^[9] The company frames building a web agent as analogous to building a robot: the agent must perceive and act in an unpredictable environment full of bot blocking, pop-ups, and constantly shifting interfaces.^[9]

Benchmark claims

According to Hark's research preview, Handoff claims the top spot on the Online-Mind2Web human-evaluation leaderboard and, averaged across three browser-use benchmarks (Online-Mind2Web, WebTailBench, and Hark's internal evaluations), outperforms OpenAI's GPT 5.4 by 8 points and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 by 2 points, while holding a wide margin over Google's Gemini-3.5 Flash and Gemini-2.5 Pro.^[9] These figures are Hark's own: only the Online-Mind2Web numbers come from the official public leaderboard (and Hark notes that some competitor entries there are self-reported by OpenAI or reported by Browserbase), while the WebTailBench and internal-evaluation results were produced by plugging all models into Hark's own internally designed harness, with pass rates computed by Hark's internal LLM judge.^[9] Adcock went further in his announcement on X, calling Handoff "independently verified as the best internet-use model ever built" and adding, "While others focus on coding, we focus on everyday life."^[11]

The official Online-Mind2Web human-evaluation leaderboard, maintained by the Ohio State University NLP group, did add a Hark Handoff entry on August 5, 2026. As of August 6, 2026, it listed Handoff with a 97.7 percent average success rate, the highest score on the board, ahead of Yutori's Navigator n1.5 at 97.3 percent, with the evaluation source listed as Careerflow.ai.^[12] Hark also says Handoff runs at an order of magnitude lower cost per token than competing frontier models, which its press release renders as "less than 1/10th the token price."^[9][10]

Training and availability

Hark said the preview results reflect post-training only: supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning, with RL used so that the agent learns directly from its own successes and failures on real tasks. The company said it had since moved into mid-training, with pre-training planned for later in 2026, describing the sequencing as a deliberate way to refine its data pipelines, evaluations, and infrastructure on the shortest path to results.^[9] Handoff launched as a research preview with a sign-up waitlist; Hark said its software platform would become available by the end of summer 2026, with its first hardware product still in development.^[9][10] Covering the launch, TechCrunch noted that the demo video Adcock shared showed only part of one task, writing that "we can't really gauge its effectiveness," and placed Handoff in a crowded field of computer-use efforts from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and browser-agent startups.^[13]

Reception

The reaction to Hark's funding announcement split along predictable lines. Supporters point to Adcock's record of building two companies worth billions and argue that consumer AI genuinely lacks a well-designed, personalized interface, which is roughly the gap Hark says it wants to fill. Skeptics note that the company raised a sum most startups never see, at a valuation usually reserved for firms with real revenue, on the strength of a vision deck and a founder's reputation. The fact that some investors had barely seen the product before wiring money became a talking point of its own.^[4]

Whether Hark ships something that "helps the normal person," in Chowdhury's phrase, or becomes a cautionary tale about pre-product valuations, will not be clear until the first models and hardware actually arrive. The company remained pre-launch until August 5, 2026, when it previewed Hark Handoff and opened a waitlist for a software platform it said would be released by the end of the summer; its hardware remained in development.^[9][10][13]

See also

• Brett Adcock
• Figure AI
• Archer Aviation
• AI hardware
• Agentic AI
• Computer use
• Browser use
• Online-Mind2Web
• AI agents

References

1. ^TechCrunch, "Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive 'universal' AI interface," May 21, 2026. techcrunch.com/...secretive-universal-ai-interface
2. ^Business Wire, "Hark Raises $700M Series A at a $6B Valuation," May 21, 2026. businesswire.com/...0M-Series-A-at-a-$6B-Valuation
3. ^Yahoo Finance, "Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive 'universal' AI interface," May 21, 2026. finance.yahoo.com/...0m-series-secretive-140000452
4. ^Business Model Analyst, "A Mystery Startup Just Raised $700M. Its Own Investors Have Barely Seen the Product." businessmodelanalyst.com/...interface-brett-adcock
5. ^Wikipedia, "Brett Adcock." en.wikipedia.org/...Brett_Adcock
6. ^TechCrunch, "Adecco Group acquires recruiting startup Vettery for $100M," February 20, 2018. techcrunch.com/...adecco-acquires-vettery
7. ^The Adecco Group, "The Adecco Group announces acquisition of Vettery," 2018. adeccogroup.com/...nnounces-acquisition-of-vettery
8. ^Today's Startup News, "Hark Raises $700M Series A at $6B Valuation for Universal AI Personal Interface." todaysstartupnews.com/...al-interface-brett-adcock
9. ^Hark, "Introducing Hark Handoff" (research preview), August 5, 2026. hark.com/...introducing-hark-handoff
10. ^Business Wire, "Hark Announces Handoff, the World's Best Web-Browsing AI Agent," August 5, 2026 (press release, cited via Yahoo Finance syndication; original at businesswire.com/...en). finance.yahoo.com/...-handoff-world-best-150000649
11. ^Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) on X, "Today we're introducing Hark Handoff," August 5, 2026. x.com/...2085018697312383349
12. ^OSU NLP Group, "Online Mind2Web Leaderboard" (human evaluation), Hugging Face Spaces, accessed August 6, 2026. huggingface.co/...Online_Mind2Web_Leaderboard
13. ^Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch, "Hark previews its browser use agent for completing tasks," August 5, 2026. techcrunch.com/...r-use-agent-for-completing-tasks